Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Particular person Rights in opposition to Progressive Reform

On this well timed reevaluation of an notorious Supreme Court docket choice, David E. Bernstein supplies a compelling survey of the historical past and background of Lochner v. New York. This 1905 choice invalidated state legal guidelines limiting work hours and have become the main case contending that novel financial laws had been unconstitutional. Certain to be controversial, Rehabilitating Lochner argues that the choice was properly grounded in precedent—and that fashionable constitutional jurisprudence owes at the least as a lot to the limited-government concepts of Lochner proponents as to the extra expansive imaginative and prescient of its Progressive opponents.
 

Tracing the affect of this choice via subsequent battles over segregation legal guidelines, intercourse discrimination, civil liberties, and extra, Rehabilitating Lochner argues not solely that the court docket acted moderately in Lochner, however that Lochner and like-minded instances have been extensively misunderstood and unfairly maligned ever since.